That Time I Made A Video Game

I don’t get to say it as often as I want on here, but I love video games. I know many people have heard others say things like:

Video games are a waste of time.

Video games just turn people into couch potatoes and rot their brains.

Video games are too violent for our kids.

I have a rebuttal: video games are like a form of art. They combine the various aspects of knowledge that humanity has cultivated for eons, and they aren’t easy to make.

For the visuals, you need a group of talented artist to bring it to life and come up with the characters. You need people who are good with math, programming, and computer science to build it. You need voice actors to play the characters. And, you need storytellers to come up with a plot.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the past.

I was finishing up my last year of college, and I was taking a unique class for an elective: Video Games as a Medium For Storytelling. The subject’s self-explanatory: we learned about using games as a medium for storytelling. There are a lot more than you’d think. Life is Strange, the Bioshock series, they’re all story based.

We did a bunch of projects to teach us about storytelling in games, but there’s one project that stuck with me: we each had to create our own video game based on the idea of choice. We could use anything we wanted, it just had to be about choice between good and evil. Then, we’d play each other’s games, provide feedback in class, and use it to improve the final product

I floated around with a couple of good ideas, but nothing ever struck me as good. I wanted to wow my class and make a game so good it wouldn’t need much improvement. While I was sitting around, thinking of ideas, I remembered St. Patrick’s Day was soon. Then a lightbulb clicked in my head, and ideas took shape: St. Patrick’s Day, Seven Leaf Clover, Leprechauns, Irish Mythology. The ideas kept coming, and before long, I had a story.

The premise was simple, but could tell a rich story. It would be about this teenager who belongs to this family with a powerful heirloom: a magic, seven-leaf clover passed down for generations that gave them supernatural luck. But the week before the main character was to inherit it, it gets stolen! Then, just to taunt them, thief leaves a message telling them to try and get the clover back before St. Patrick’s Day or it will gone forever. So you then set out on a quest that takes you to from the streets of New York all the way to the coast of Ireland. I called the whole thing Luck O’ The Irish.

I put everything into this game to make it as fun a text-based game as I could. There were multiple choices for every decision, all leading to one of three endings: good, neutral, and bad. And just for fun, I decided to throw in as many pop culture references that I could possibly think of. That meant gifs, images, or quoting them directly.

By the time I was done, Luck O’ The Irish was a huge hit. Everyone in class said that it was an amazing and hilarious game. Actually, I think I had ended up going overboard with it, because most of the other’s games were as long as mine. In the end, I got an A+, and I have kept the game on my computer. With St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I thought it’d be a great idea to post this on my website. So here it is, Luck O’ The Irish. Enjoy, everyone!

"Consider, can the universe be justifiably called infinite? Doubtful. It may not have a discernible end, but it had a beginning and its component parts definitely have a limited cosmological shelf-life. Splitting hairs or not, if history tells us anything, it's that scientists often make very poor poets. We're all just a ship of fools chasing phantoms, heedless of what really underwrites natural law." - Okabe Rintaro